How I Stay Sane: My Mental Hygiene Routine

[Music] too [Music] hi and welcome to the vlog this is going to be a very weird different one but i do mention here and there that i do kind of like cbt with myself and i do like self therapy here and there when i can and i get a lot of questions on what i do specifically and what are the exercises that i do and how i reset myself to show you exactly what i do to kind of reset myself when i need it so let's get started let's get chatting shall we let's talk about cbt um this is really cool i'm excited about this by the way i'm not a mental health professional so i don't know how to describe this it's just something that i've tried again and again but i'm definitely not an expert in but basically cbt is a form of kind of therapy i think it's a combination of talking therapy but it's a very active and proactive form of dealing with your issues and your problems and basically it's part of you know all of the things that we try to do in therapy to try to help someone feel better and the reason that i particularly like cbt is that you don't necessarily need a therapist to do it um at least of course like i wish i had a therapist all the time but um that's just not feasibly possible because it's quite expensive and it's kind of difficult to access or get online having therapy in the past i've taken my cbt exercises and they're things that i do um by myself all the time so they're tend to be very very helpful for me so um yeah it's just a kind of an empowering way of viewing your life and viewing your world so the kind of exercises and ways of thinking and frameworks that i used in cbt are during therapy themselves are things that i use by myself again and again and basically how it works is i'm sure there's various different ways i'm just going to discuss not even the things that i particularly did in therapy because i don't remember all of them but i'm going to discuss the ones that i'm going to be doing today and the things that i kind of do whenever i tend to kind of feel like i'm spiraling or not feeling too well um so they tend to be basically exercises and frameworks to approach anything happening in my life and how i organize that into something that is more effective a better way of viewing it perhaps and in a way that will change my thoughts will change my behaviors and will change my approach to things and will hopefully mean that i have a better experience overall so i think the first thing that i wanted to address is when do you know that you need therapy or when do you know that you need kind of help or when do i know for example that i need to take time out and at least for me the times there is two times one is when it's blatantly obvious and that's either when i feel extremely low for a long amount of time or if i'm crying a lot or if i'm just feeling just having a really bad experience in general i'm sure everyone knows what this feels like when you just feel bad when you feel like saying that you're depressed even though that's kind of technically a diagnosis but when you feel like saying i'm depressed i'm low and i'm unhappy um i think those are the cases when i know that okay we need to intervene here because things are not okay but the other time is sometimes i feel and this is a new one for me because i didn't realize that this was a problem before if that makes sense um and that is when i have kind of unreasonable reactions to things that are happening in my life so what i mean is for example if there is a situation or if i am having a conversation with someone someone or if something happens to me and i have an overreaction and it doesn't need to be an extreme reaction because i'm not someone who tends to get very angry for example so it doesn't have to be like that but if even in my internal states i feel extremely low or extremely triggered or extremely vulnerable or extremely scared or um kind of extremely insecure if something happens in my life that is a small action but triggers a huge reaction by proportion in me i realize that i'm carrying something that has not been dealt with and i'm bringing something else to the conversation so what i mean for example is that let's say someone said um hey elizabeth we are i'm going to cancel our dinner tomorrow um if a friend of mine said that and my reaction was to start crying and or my reaction was to feel as though um feel extremely sad and feel abandoned and feel as though this friend doesn't like me and um they must hate me therefore or they must not want to be friends with me any longer or i'm just not funny i'm not interesting these are thoughts that i've had in the past when an action like this has happened and these i think we can all agree are out of proportion to the action itself the action of someone canceling dinner could mean simply that they just didn't have time or they had to rearrange something or they just didn't feel like engaging with someone else and if i'm taking that person me and kind of feeling really really abandoned and feeling really miserable and feeling horrible it probably means that i'm carrying things from my past and bringing these other assumptions to the table entering these assumptions of my own into the conversation and the interaction that are leading to a terrible experience on my part which is just not there and i think that's when i realize when i have outer proportion reactions um that i probably have issues that i haven't dealt with and i think it's quite good that once in a while i tend to do this as often as i can i kind of reevaluate what assumptions i carry in life because by doing that i think i i get to kind of deal with my issues as they're arising rather than let them accumulate and i think it's completely impossible to be like 26 years old and to not have issues it's just not possible things happen in life um and if we're not dealing with them kind of constantly if we're not doing some spring cleaning and i like to use the word mental hygiene because this is what i call it i quite like in my mind it's mental hygiene it's you have routines around cleaning your body i do have routines about cleaning my mind too and making sure that one i address issues that are really really deep seated and those i tend to do with a therapist so um when i had very and i still have i don't think you ever get rid of them fully but i had deep seated issues from my childhood and those are things that i have addressed in therapy and potentially will still dress in therapy in the future um so those are kind of the ingrained problems in my life and then as i go forward in life um things will happen all the time there will be micro um kind of conversations or micro rejections or micro failures or kind of micro angers and micro hurts that i'm just accumulating every single day and they are potentially subconsciously building this narrative in my mind that can be not so good um and these narratives can be grandiose can be like i'm an incredible person um i don't deserve the things that are happening to me or these narratives can be very negative in the sense of um you know i'm unworthy this is why these things are happening to me mine tend to be on the negative end of the spectrum um which means that my default state tends to be that of quite low self-esteem um and i tend to blame myself for a lot of things that are happening in the world and in my life um which is not necessarily true and i know that i carry assumptions in my mind or at least i have carried assumptions in my mind in the past that i am kind of not a very good person or i'm not a very clever person i'm not a very beautiful person i'm not a very funny person i'm not a very interesting person and um therefore i don't deserve good things and i think that there's i'm going into this long round sorry this is going to be a long video you know what i'm just gonna put this video out the way that it ends up being so um i've taken this time out to kind of reevaluate where different things stand in my life and see why i'm behaving and why i'm feeling the way that i am and what kind of underlying assumptions do i have behind that so that's what's going to happen i don't know why my food is not here yet so i'm really keen on getting the food here as soon as possible and then we're going to do the exercise yeah let's do that soon i'll try to put together a notion template too just in case you want to download it that way so it makes a bit more sense but i'm going to go through the logical flow of what i do when i try to kind of lower my anxiety and do self-cbt and kind of organize my thoughts on what i'm thinking so let's go through it together okay let's start the first thing that i do is i create a long list of things that i'm thinking about at the moment and this is kind of like a brain dump and i write literally everything it's a combination of anything that's on my mind it can be something that i haven't done yet a to-do list or something really really bored like a common anxiety i've been having over the last few days or anything that i've been thinking or pondering or like stressing over um so everything basically goes down here one thing that i like to use as a prompt for this and this is not awful but i like to think of the things that make me feel as though being punched in the gut like what are the things that just make me feel like oh this if you've ever had anxiety or dread or something like that or if you've ever been like overworked you're like really really stressed with things that you're doing you know that feeling it just comes from your guts as there's something that's being like wretched out of you and or punched into you so those are the sort of things that i use as a prompt like what in the last month or the last few months having me has been making me feel as though i'm being punched in the gut and i will just write down the list of this whole thing and once i have this like complete brain done what i will do is then turn it into two categories so on one side on one list i'm going to put the things that are tasks so a to-do list sort of situation and on the other side i'm going to put things that are kind of like to process so i create a to-do list and a two-process last not to do list go things like if i have um kind of deadlines or stresses over work if i have things that i need to kind of organize if i have things that i need to think about like things like this youtube channel my podcast my job my course my other job the videos i need to film for work and the slides i need to prepare and the things that i need to do and organize and um going back to university and organizing university having to move house all of these things will go into my to-do list because they're literal actions that i need to do and so then everything that is left becomes a true process list and this means it's kind of like a something that has to more of an effect or some way that i feel and an effect of something that i've been going through or something that's happened to me recently that will go into my two process list now whether to do this this tends to be the easier thing to do because um i can i will structure things with order of importance because sometimes um they there's just too much and there's so many exercises that say just write down all the lists of the things that you want to focus on and then just pick three and delete all the rest i cannot afford to do that unfortunately so i will try to leave this to three or four things and then i'll say for example i'm not going to continue my podcast for a while or i'm not going to do my course for a while or i'm not going to do this aspect of my job for a while um because i just can't do all this right now so this tends to be the list of things that i can either leave for later or say that are the top or the top list of importance or the bottom list of importance or anything in between so that will be my to-do lesson that's sorted not too interesting the most interesting thing is the two process list and this tends to be all of my beliefs all of my anxieties all of my worries all of my uh kind of concerns or the things that i potentially want to say or do or haven't done or just things that are brewing in my mind and kind of just all the awfulness that creates that low-key anxiety or kind of like depressive feeling inside me so this will go into my two process list and i will just write all these things down together and then i will group them and they will go into categories depending on kind of what they are talking about so is this a body image issue is this a self-esteem issue is this a um i don't want to go into detail on to what mine are but it tends to be things in these sort of categories for example love category family category friendship category loneliness category um kind of worthiness category so i tend to group these depending on what the kind of belief is if that makes sense so they tend to fall into themes and once i have these themes this time around i had five themes i want to have five different themes and these are just one word so it can be like love or it can be a person or it can be a belief or it can be just a like a a topic in general these tend to be five things and then what i will do is i will start my theory a theory b now theory a therapy is something that um my therapist taught me like two years ago and it was really really helpful at the time and i still use it now for so many different things not for what it was originally used for on me um and basically what theory a theory b is theory a is the belief that you are function the assumption that you are functioning under and this is super important because um theory a it really gets down to the core of what are the assumptions with which you are living if i say that consciously i believe that i deserve happiness right this is something that i believe however if i see that i am consciously doing things or not doing things in order to self-sabotage myself and in a way kind of make myself not be happy and if i keep doing this consistently it means that actually i'm functioning under the true assumption that i am not worthy and i don't deserve happiness and that is the core belief so that's very a and even theory a tends to be like a very extreme stance but it's the one that even though you wouldn't want to say out loud and once you say you know it's ridiculous you actually believe it because that's the theory with which you're functioning so if um i have core beliefs the theory a's of like i am extremely ugly or if i say what i feel people will abandon me or i don't deserve things that i have in life or so it can be very extreme stances on this so with all of these five themes that i had the five problems that i have i will put my theory a and theory a is based on my actions over the last few months based on my reactions to things based on the things that i've done and the things that i haven't done based on the ways that i have felt what do i actually believe about myself and this will go in my theory a column and this tends to be awful awful stuff it tends to be really really terrible stuff and i will just go into detail that if this happens that happens these are what are my beliefs about myself or my core beliefs that i am subconsciously functioning under and then after i've done this i will go into part two of this which is what is my evidence for this so what is my evidence for example that i am unworthy and this can be the fact that someone has said this to me in the past um this can be the fact that multiple people may have sentenced to me in the past this can be the fact that i have interpreted something happening to me in life to mean that i am unworthy um this can be the fact that i i believe that if um i do this thing then people will abandon me so this will be all the evidence that i can find in my life that affirms this belief and i will leave this there then i'll go on to theory b so theory b is okay we said that we're unworthy for example what is an alternative explanation here so theory b tends to be the more realistic down to earth reasonable explanation so something along the lines of you know we all have good and bad in us and we all deserve happiness for example this is super vague it doesn't tend to be things like this i just don't want to open up specifically about what mine are but it will be something along these lines where i'll go into detail that if um people are all worthy or something along the lines of if you are honest and open with people they will not abandon you or if you express your needs in the long term it means that people will stick around the right people will stick around or if you express your needs or if you express your needs explicitly in the long term it will mean that the right people will stick around and it will be this kind of theory b kind of thing which is counter to theory a and more realistic and then this is the fun part i will go into my life to look for evidence for theory b and this is something that naturally i would never do because i'm very much um i like i find it a lot easier to find evidence for negative things then i find evidence for positive things but if i try and this is why i love this exercise because it gives me the space to go okay let's consider for a moment that i'm not the worst person on earth what is the evidence for this and then i can go oh you know my friend said that i was a wonderful person last week or um i i'm possibly not stupid because i got this promotion at work or i actually did very well in my exam and um it's highly unlikely that i'm going to completely fail and everything is going to be a disaster because i have this proof so it tends to be realistic things in my life that affirm theory b so once i have this balance of theory a this is the assumption under which i'm functioning which is really really horrible and i admit that i have this evidence that i've gathered from my life that makes it true but what if this theory be so the opposite of this or something more neutral was true and actually i have a lot of evidence for this too and because theory b tends to be very very rational its evidence tends to be a lot longer and a lot more reasonable so when i look at things this way i can go actually i think i've been i'm being ridiculous and obviously theory a is not true um there are some theory a's that i have still not let go of even after years and years of doing this exercise i have some core beliefs that um are just so difficult and i i do this exercise again and again for them and you know sometimes for a second i feel as though i've just let go of this terrible thing but then no it's it's not true but anyways um so i will see that theory is kind of true and then that will lead me to my action plan and the action plan tends to be what sort of things can i do now so how can i change my behavior in such a way that reflects that theory b is true so that could be for example if i think i'm completely unworthy on one end and that is because um two people have abandoned me and a third person has told me that i'm completely unworthy and this is why i have this core belief um on the other hand i have to believe that i am not unworthy because i have these other friends who have said this other things and i've done i've got what i deserve for xyz and everyone is good and bad so there's no there's no reason to think that i am more unworthy than the average person so once i have this theory a theory b in the bottom of this i will then put kind of um what are my action points from there so my action points from this might be things like let me see what i've done for my um my actual case here i can be decisions um it can be decisions based on behavior so it can be okay um i no longer need to interact with this person or i can interact with this other person in a different way um or i need to make explicit my needs in the situation or it can be actions or things that i can take and it kind of gives me the confidence and the space to do the right thing basically that i would recommend to someone else um because it's a lot easier to believe these terrible things about myself and it is to believe them about other people so i'm done with this i will basically have these kind of um i will have these kind of tables so i have a table here i have the theme at the top i have theory a theory b and then everything in theory a all the proof of theory a everything in theory b or the proof theory b and um the evidence in the end and then it kind of helps me i guess neutralize a lot of these negative thoughts and get to the point of being a bit more reasonable about them once i'm done with this it kind of helps things but it doesn't let go of all my anxiety then i go back to say saying um what are the things that make me feel as though i'm being punched in the guts and i really like this question i use it again and it kind of resurfaces either the things that i have already dealt with or new things that are just giving me anxiety that are small things and then i'll think okay um is there any need here that is not being met so i do like to do a needs less too and it needs less goes through the things that i the things that i need at the moment to make myself feel better and it's kind of like sitting myself down and explicitly saying okay what do you need right now and sometimes i have a need to be less lonely um so that means a need for love or a need for affection or a need for space a need for peace a need for time off a need for doing things that i enjoy um so i'll put the list of my needs and then i will put a list of the needs that have to do with other people that i haven't expressed because this tends to be quite long for me i find it really difficult to verbally express my needs which i think is one of my biggest issues um so at the end of this exercise i have an action plan of people that i need to express needs to and people with whom i need to be a bit more explicit in my life and so that's also done and then um in the end of in the end of it i will do two other nests i'm sorry i just love my list and i love structuring things like this i love breaking down kind of the mess into very concrete things um and at the end of this thing i will do the bad things that have happened to me since i've done this exercise and also good things that have happened to me since i've done this exercise and i do this because for the bad things i can kind of look back on them and go what kind of wrong conclusions can i come to based on this event so let's say i was rejected over something will i have internalized than the thought that i'm not worthy or will i have internalized the thought that i don't deserve good things or will i then have internalized the thought that i am ugly or stupid or um unlikable or unlovable and i will kind of check that conclusion so i will write that conclusion down and then i'll have the list of these negative beliefs and some of them will be the same as my theory a's there'll be negative things that i dealt with already but then i just kind of resurface them and go okay i realize that i've gathered evidence for these terrible things over the last few months can we just acknowledge now that this isn't true and on the other hand and and on the other end uh this is the part that kind of takes me the most time is going through the positive things that have happened through the last month for the last few months because um generally i have such a negative bias when it comes to events in my life um and so i find it sometimes difficult to remember the good things but i since i've been doing this exercise i've become much better at this so i'll go through positive things that have happened kind of it might be a promotion it might be something nice that a friend said to me um it might be something um a situation where i felt really good or something that just made me feel great about myself and i will write these down and then i will see these will usually fit into some theory bees so give me evidence um to the contrary of the negative things that i tend to think about myself so yeah um after that basically i will then um look at all of my action points together and i will create one master list of action points which i already have now um and this will be a combination of my action points for the activities that i wanted to sort out an action point for the moving myself from functioning under theory a and doing all these horrible toxic not productive things to moving more towards theory b which is more a more neutral a more objective a more not self-hating version of elizabeth so then i will kind of um work through that and yeah and send that so then i will kind of work through that um list of things to do and it kind of gives me the structure of my mind i have an action plan and i know what i'm going to do and then um that is almost everything the last thing that i do is write a list of things that make me happy um the things that i do to make me happy so for example exercise especially when i go to the gym and i'm on a quality sheen this tends to be a very happy activity for me i'm going to the movies with my friends or watching a movie with a friend um having good food having meeting people meeting new people um kind of creating new connections especially when i meet someone for the first time it tends to be really really nice um when i meet um when i meet very old friends or when i meet new people for very first time that tends to be really really nice um kind of stretching i just love stretching it's such a good it just puts me such a good mindset and i haven't done it for like almost two three weeks now which is completely bizarre um and yeah i've and creating videos that i do creating videos and content i do enjoy um listening to podcasts um especially listening to podcasts while i'm going on a long walk i haven't done this basically since i was last in finland so a very long time ago um and uh reading books especially non-fiction so i've been reading um virginia wolf's book this kind of get away and it's been just so amazing so reading more books like that reading more philosophy um rereading books which i love to do and sometimes i don't like myself because i feel like it's unproductive so um i'm really this this month i've just been allowing myself to reread old books again and again and it feels amazing um and kind of being like honest and being around people that i enjoy and especially touching people die that i love i feel that i love my joy i just love like cuddling and physical touch just makes me feel really really great so this is kind of the list of things that make me feel good and i think refreshing this in my mind and going okay i want to do more of this will make me feel better so yes uh and also i've decided to potentially take some more time off and um structure my and have a bit more boundaries around how i spend my time and especially when it comes to work not going always like yeah sure i'll do that yes i'll do that at any time of the day um any day of the week but rather creating some more boundaries around potentially having one day off a week um would be great but yes so that was basically everything so yes that was basically everything i am um going to wrap this video up here potentially i don't know if i'll have a bit of footage maybe tomorrow um but yeah this was it this this has felt great i really enjoyed not being in my bed at home because i spent way too much time there especially with the um kind of the recent few weeks just i've basically been in bed mostly um and i was really sick of my room so um it's great that i that i had this break somewhere else and i feel really really privileged and great for being able to actually do this at all so yeah if you made it so far honestly thanks this is a very very random video um so i hope it was helpful at all and i hope it clarified a bit um what i tend to do and how i do cbt on myself basically to try to change my core beliefs and which is basically what this is is functioning under beliefs that are potentially not true and that i'm not even realizing that i'm doing so yeah um that was everything sorry for the audio on this video because i don't have a microphone with me i forgot it so i'm recording on my camera which i never do um so the audio might be atrocious otherwise thank you so much for spending this time with me as always i'm gonna go and take a nice long bath and um yeah and go home tomorrow i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and good luck let me know how this goes if you do try it out and if it helps at all please go to therapy if you can if you can get therapy and if you can't afford it just do it it's the best thing on earth it's been one of the most life-changing things for me and i could not recommend it anymore so yeah hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 300,026

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Id: JSOJDVugIQ0

Length: 26min 4sec (1564 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022